What’s Wrong with Detroit’s Proposed Airbnb Regulation
There are issues with how the implementation of Airbnb has evolved. Those issues should be addressed. But the regulation, as proposed, achieves little of that. In fact, what it mostly achieves is robbing those who arguably are the best examples…
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The Elephant in the CNU (Art 1)
Recently, I was privileged to receive a registration waiver for the CNU27 conference in Louisville. I was delighted to be able to go, delighted to explore Louisville, and variably delighted to participate in some of the sessions. But there are…
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Engage the Terrain
In my final semester of a dual graduate degree, I am engaged in two planning activities which are not quite real projects, but also not completely thought-exercises. They are also not quite professional practice, nor completely academic. These categories matter…
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Urbanist Series – Blood and Soil
One of the advantages in looking at community organizing and development through the field of social work is that it consistently invites you to dilate the lens from micro to macro. I am always intrigued, for example, by how communities…
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Just Whip It
<align=just>I moved to Detroit partly in response to a subconscious nudge which can never genuinely be broken down in rational terms: these nudges are Gestalt. But mentally, I expected Detroit to present every form of social questioning, and so it…
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The City Corner, a Crux and Axis
Detroit is a unique city in that, aesthetically, it’s not a city at all. It looks, to an eye trained for urban markers, like a suburb which has a size problem and unusual industrial impact. Few commercial corridors exist in…
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My Airbnb: Hostess with the Someness
I lived in diaspora from 2011-2014, traveling extensively while working internationally and engaging in barter agreements for housing while I went through my first post-bac program. When I entered my current graduate degree program and finally settled into my own…
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The Master’s Tools: Subversive Planning in the Self-Help Revolution
Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a [hu]man, you take it.-Malcolm X Introduction There is no planning that is separate from the essential function to make the human experience better:…
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Impish Thoughts
So, I watched the Superbowl ad from yesterday which opens with apocalypse, in the conventional Biblical sense. Horrors are being visited on the world, the order of things is turned upside down: dogs are walking people; God is Black. This…
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